P. Parrish - An Unquiet Grave

For a second, they were still; then Spera moved aside the straps and they stared at the body.

It lay faceup, the arms extended by the fall. The clothes were intact, a plain shirt and dark trousers, both wet and muddy. The hands were black with decay and tapered into grotesque gobs of bumpy, dark mush. The hair was combed straight back, wet and speckled with mud.

But it was the face Louis couldn’t stop looking at. The skin was waxy, flesh-colored, and except for a rotted black hole on the left side of the mouth and another one down the neck, the corpse looked almost normal. There were a pair of rusty, wire-rimmed glasses lying by the head.

It was Becker, Louis knew. Older, fatter, and eaten with grave rot, but it was him.

Louis looked up, meeting Dalum’s eyes behind the glass of the mask. Dalum knew, too. Louis felt a hard rush of disappointment and he lifted his gaze up. Spera was coming back from his flatbed truck with a body bag.

Louis moved forward to help slip Becker’s body into the bag. Parts of Becker’s hands and feet came off and by the time the bag was loaded on the truck, Louis’s stomach was turning.

“If you guys will stay and keep an eye on all this,” Spera shouted through the mask, “I’ll go get a few of my guys and come back and clean it all up.”

Louis nodded. Dalum nudged him and motioned with his head toward the pine trees near the gate. Ahead of them Louis saw Delp. He was standing upright, shivering, his hands covering his face.

As Louis and Dalum passed, Delp stumbled after them. No one stopped until they got to Dalum’s car. Louis jerked off the mask and his gloves, tossing them to the ground. The air wasn’t great, even under the pines, but it was breathable. He glanced at Delp.

“You okay?”

Delp’s skin was wet and gray, and he was staring off toward Becker’s grave.

“It was him, wasn’t it?” Delp whispered.

“Looked like it.”

“How come he still had a face?”

“It’s called adipocere,” Louis said. “It’s a chemical process that happens as the body fat is altered somehow, and the body doesn’t decompose.”

“I’ve heard it called grave wax,” Dalum said.

The smell was still strong and Louis looked down at his sneakers. Shit. They had the grave water on them. So did the cuffs of his jeans.

“So,” Delp said, his voice stronger now, “where do we go from here?”

Louis looked to his right, toward the trees and the hospital beyond them. He knew where they needed to go. They needed to go back to where the murderer had felt at home, the place he still haunted. E Building. That’s where they would find him, among the hundreds of records stacked in that musty little room.

Louis wiped a hand over his cold, sweating brow.

But there were so many records and the attacks spanned more than two decades. And there was no way a judge was going to give them a warrant to randomly search confidential files for a nameless and faceless killer.

They had to narrow this down. They had to know what kind of man they were looking for. And that could only come from someone who worked in E Building for a long time. Someone who knew these guys better than they knew themselves.

He looked at Dalum. “Chief, can we get a list of people admitted during a certain time period?”

Dalum shrugged. “You mean just admission dates and names?”

“Yeah.”

“I suppose we could. Nothing confidential about that,” he said. “That’s going to be a helluva list, Louis.”

“I know. But we need it to narrow down the suspect pool.”

“But all we’ll have is names,” Dalum said. “We won’t know anything about these people. It’ll take weeks, maybe years, of legwork to even start eliminating people.”

Louis was staring at the point in the milky sky where a single red brick chimney could be glimpsed above the trees.

“I know someone who can do it faster,” he said.

Louis was slumped in a hard metal chair when Dr. Seraphin came out of the elevator. She stopped, her keys in her gloved hand, and looked at him in surprise.

“Well, hello, Mr. . ” she began.

“Kincaid,” Louis said, standing and stretching. He had been waiting outside her office for the last hour.

A smile creased her wind-ruddy cheeks. “Louis, right?”

“Right. I need to talk to you, Doctor,” he said.

“Well, I have someone coming in soon,” she said, shifting the strap of her black alligator briefcase up her shoulder.

“It’s important,” Louis said. “We might have another murder victim at Hidden Lake.”

Dr. Seraphin’s smile faded. “Good Lord.”

“We found some bones buried in a shallow grave and we were able to trace them to a young woman who came to the hospital last year for outpatient help.”

Two students passed them in the narrow hallway, giving Seraphin and Louis a strange look.

“I think you’d better come in,” Dr. Seraphin said, unlocking the office door.

Louis waited as she took off her gray cape and gloves, and slid her briefcase under the desk. When she motioned for him to take a chair, he sat down across from her desk.

“So why are you here to see me?” she asked.

Louis recounted everything he knew so far, including his talk with Millie Reuben and the fact that Rebecca Gruber had been burned. He told her also about exhuming Donald Lee Becker’s body. The doctor’s face remained impassive throughout, and Louis had the sense that she was taking this all in not as any woman might but as a psychiatrist would-with a calm, clinical interest.

“We think whoever killed them is a former patient,” Louis concluded. “Someone probably released in recent years.”

“Why recent?” Dr. Seraphin asked.

“If this patient had been out for a long time, we would have other victims,” Louis said.

“Maybe there are more and you just haven’t found them,” she said.

Louis nodded. “That’s possible.”

Dr. Seraphin leaned her elbows on the desk and clasped her hands in front of her face. “So what exactly do you want from me?” she asked.

“Help in finding possible suspects.”

The doctor’s eyebrows shot up.

“There’s not a judge in the world who will grant me access to medical files,” Louis said. “And I don’t even know what I am looking for. He may not ever have been convicted of anything, so I can’t just look at criminal records.”

Dr. Seraphin shook her head. “I’d like to help you, Mr. Kincaid, but as I told you, I left Hidden Lake a long time ago. If the person you are looking for was in fact released recently, I wouldn’t know him.”

Louis stifled a sigh. She was right of course.

“And while I am certainly not one to question the police’s logic, I think you could be wrong about this being a recently released patient,” Dr. Seraphin added.

Louis sat up straighter in his chair. “Why?”

“Well, most patients were released back in the seventies,” Dr. Seraphin said.

“The seventies?”

“It was part of a mass movement to deinstitutionalize the mentally ill. The thinking was that the best approach was to integrate them into society rather than keep them locked up.” She shook her head slowly. “I’m not so sure now it was in fact the right thing to do. But then, the entire history of mental health is really nothing but trial and error when it comes down to it. There is a lot of-what is the sports cliché?-Sunday morning quarterbacking.”

“Monday morning,” Louis said with a smile.

She smiled back. “We’ve tried hard. But the public generally still thinks of mental health professionals as quacks or monsters.”

“So why were all these patients released?” Louis asked.